Three Italians have begun a motorbike ride from Venice to Hiroshima, taking with them a thousand paper cranes made by Italian children as a message of peace.
The 20,000 km journey, expected to last about six weeks, will take the three Venetians through the bleak steppes of Siberia and the shifting sands of the Gobi desert.
The motorcyclists, carrying their precious cargo of paper birds and prepared for all weather conditions, began their adventure late on Friday from Venice's St Mark's Square.
"It's the Asian stretch, the part from Siberia to Mongolia, that thrills me the most," said 46-year-old doctor Carlo Mascarin, who said he had been training hard in the gym all year in preparation.
"The roads are dirt tracks and, from what we gather, in certain parts of Siberia there are no roads at all".
On the way to Hiroshima, where the first atomic bomb was dropped in 1945, the three Italians will stop off in Ukraine at a home for children affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1987.
The motorbike ride, as well as raising money for charity, also aims to awaken public opinion to "the two biggest nuclear tragedies of the 20th century".
The initiative is called the Sadako Project, after a Japanese girl of that name who died in 1955 from the effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima ten years earlier. A statue commemorating Sadako stands in a park in the city.
"We'll hang the thousand paper cranes on the statue of the little Sadako. She died before she managed to achieve her goal," Mascarin said.
According to a Japanese legend, anyone who makes 1,000 origami cranes will have a wish granted by the gods. Sadako began folding birds when she developed leukemia, hoping the gods would let her live.
She died before reaching her target.
The trans-Asia motorbike journey is sponsored by the city of Hiroshima. A tree will be planted in a Shintoist temple in the city to commemorate the expedition.
